Marking your work with a copyright notice does a number of things: – notifies the public that the work is protected by copyright and that the owner takes that protection seriously – distinguishes the work as not being in the…
With the D: All Things Digital conference going on right now, there is a great video posted over on Kara Swisher’s digital column: an interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 conference back in 2007. Interesting to…
Did you miss a deadline with the Patent Office or pay the wrong fee? Doing these things, and some others, can cause your application to become abandoned. An abandoned application isn’t necessarily dead. You have a couple of options. First,…
When you purchase a trademark, there is no requirement that you record the sale, but it sure is a good idea. Why? Take this example: Owner A sells a trademark (and the underlying goodwill) to buyer B. Buyer B never…
Please, lawyers, please, stop writing “X statute provides in pertinent part.” Several reasons. First,you’re probably not using it right, because you’re quoting the whole statute. Second, if you’re only quoting part of the statute, then your use of ellipses will…
I blogged about open-source solutions a bit ago, and it looks like the open-source / crowdsourcing / community-based design approach is being applied again. GE is soliciting ideas from the public for their next ad campaign. Another example of leveraging…
Once you’ve filed your federal trademark registration application, you’ve more or less cast it in stone. There are some things that you can change while the application is being processed, but generally, the Patent and Trademark Office is resistant to…
Steve O’Donnell, over at 3C Patent Law, has a nice, quick description of how a trademark owner can lose its rights through dilution. I’ve excerpted some of it here, but read the whole post for a better explanation: Consider this…
I’ve been getting a recurring question lately: “Will you sign this Non Disclosure Agreement before I tell you about the invention I want you to write a patent application for?” Sometimes, the question is phrased, “how much do you charge…
A business doesn’t necessarily own everything created by its workers. The question of ownership comes down to many factors, chief among them being the presence of an employment contract. Employees typically produce work that is owned by the business –…